"The fertility rate in Utah decreased in 2009 and 2010 by more than 4 percent, according to the state health department. But even as the economy improved, the state's fertility rate continued to decline. In 2015, it was down about 2.5 percent compared with 2014."

This is good news. Less mormons being born. Sounds like the women are finally catching on. Kids are expensive and exhausting. The church doesn't help pay for those kids they tell you to have. Having less kids in the next life doesn't sound like its such a bad deal. The only people who thought it was a good idea were men who needed workers on the farm. Not so many of those around any more.

Again, economics is playing a huge part in family size now days.Fewer and fewer women are able to be stay at home mothers.Keeping up with the Mormon Joneses is huge in Utah, from my observation.Houses are bigger, mortgages require two incomes, and family life changes a little every generation.Divorce is taking a huge toll also.The single parent now has limited their family numbers.

Even when I was active in the 1960's to 90's I knew few families with eight or more children. We don't need a lot of children to support the family, anymore. In fact, it is more and more difficult to financially support more than four children.

It appears that the LDS Church has been slowly dwindling on many fronts. It looks like a common trend all through the religious landscape.

The biggest reason most "cultures" have large numbers of children came from high infant mortality rates. Since lots of kids are going to die, having a lot of 'em meant at least a few would survive. That was the case among "pioneer" mormons, even with all the leaders going on about providing "tabernacles."

That reason, at least in most parts of the world, is gone.

High birth rates aren't sustainable. Even mormons are beginning to figure that out. And since almost all kids now survive infancy, if you really want two or three kids, that's all you need to have -- not ten to get two or three.

That's especially the case outside of Utah, as many areas are expensive places to live and raise a family. In California even when I was a member, Mormons had at most, 4 children. The majority of the women in the ward I was in worked, mostly because they had to in order to keep their homes. When the recession and foreclosure crisis hit, both wards in that building were hit so hard by families having to move out that they had to be combined into a single ward.

I'm glad statistics support this. When I was a kid, it seemed like six was the very minimum of offspring a family could produce and still be considered an acceptably large family (because only large families were acceptable). Now a family with six children seems excessively large even by Utah standards.

Caesarean section deliveries may be a factor in many of the cases of three or fewer children among the Q12 and 1st Pres.Many of the wives had their children before the days of lower transverse incisions, when most OBGYNs preferred that their patients have no more than three of such deliveries, and before VBACs were an option. Even back then, some women had more than three C-sections (Ethel Kennedy's last five children were born via c-section when Classical [higher vertical] abdominal incisions were the norm), but "three" was the standard cut-off recommendation for most doctors. Now, most OBGYNs I know are comfortable performing up to four Caesareans on a woman. Some women push it further, and, depending upon their own bodies and their own healing, it may be perfectly safe to do so, though I've never known an obstetrician who was happy about delivering a sixth baby via c-section.

More women work outside the home in Utah than stay at home. It has been that way for a while. The stats don't surprise me. When I was active, having more than 4 kids, was a big family. I also lived in a newly wed/nearly dead ward. Maybe they reproduced more after moving.